Talks to Settle Wages Keep Last Lights on at Joint Korean Complex

SEOUL, South Korea — All the remaining South Korean factory managers in an industrial park in North Korea returned home early Tuesday, as political tensions drove the two Koreas to sever their last economic ties.

The withdrawal of the 43 factory managers means that the Kaesong Industrial Complex, in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, will be emptied out except for seven South Koreans who will remain for a few days to sort out a dispute over unpaid wages.

When that is settled, South Korea is expected to turn off the electricity it supplies to the complex, which until now has been one of the most brightly lighted parts of North Korea, a country shrouded in darkness at night because of a severe lack of fuel.

South Korea had planned to withdraw all 50 of its citizens from Kaesong by 5 p.m. Monday, but a dispute over the payment of some wages and taxes owed North Korea delayed their departure. In the end, 43 factory managers were allowed to cross the border shortly after midnight, while five officials and two communications technicians from the South agreed to stay on to sort out the dispute.

North Korea pulled out all of its 53,000 workers from Kaesong on April 9 in a protest against joint military exercises by the United States and South Korea that it said raised the possibility of war. It also blocked South Korean managers and supply trucks from entering the complex.

But it was not until Friday, when the North rejected a proposal for dialogue, that the South announced a decision to pull all of its 175 managers and officials, who had stayed in Kaesong hoping that the complex would reopen. Of those, 125 crossed the border on Saturday, loading as many finished products as they could carry on the trunks, seats, roofs and hoods of their cars.

The emptying out of the Kaesong complex represents a new low in inter-Korean relations. South Korea cut off all other economic ties with North Korea in 2010, blaming it for the sinking of a warship and the deaths of 46 sailors. North Korea cut off all military and Red Cross hot lines with the South last month, removing all official ties between the Koreas except for the lines of communication between their civil aviation authorities.

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“When they abruptly turn a mutual agreement into bubbles like this, who in the world would be willing to invest in North Korea?” President Park Geun-hye of South Korea said about what she called the unpredictability of the North’s government during a meeting with senior officials on Monday.

Since it began operations in late 2004, the Kaesong industrial park, where South Korea ran factories with low-wage North Korean labor, had served as a symbol of Korean cooperation. But in recent years, as those ties deteriorated and the two Koreas shed other joint projects, the complex stood as the last vestige of the “sunshine policy” of encouraging political reconciliation through economic exchanges that the South had pursued from 1998 to 2008.

So far, the Kaesong complex is the biggest casualty in the standoff that developed after North Korea’s nuclear test in February.

“The window of dialogue is still open,” Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se of South Korea said Monday in a speech at a forum organized by his ministry and the East Asia Institute in Seoul. But he warned that if North Korea did not abandon its “old playbook” of stoking tensions to win economic concessions from its adversaries, “its isolation would only deepen.” He also called North Korea’s ambition to both keep nuclear weapons and rebuild its economy a “daydream.”

North Korea indicated that it was placing military priorities over the $90 million its Kaesong workers earned annually at the factory park.

On Saturday, the North said shutting the complex down for good would allow the North Korean military to redeploy more troops, artillery and tanks along the border just north of Seoul, the South Korean capital, “thus opening up the route of advancing to the South.” The building of the Kaesong complex pushed those North Korean troops away from the corridor between Kaesong and Seoul, which had served as the North Korean Army’s main invasion route at the outset of the Korean War in 1950.